you are right, adding or deleting spaces during editing is not a good idea and could lead to a mess.

However, Scrivener could delete a space upon the compilation. Footnotes are naturally placed after the last symbol in the sentence without any preceding spaces, and I don’t think that an option to delete a space if there is one would cause many troubles for users.

It would not only make it look better but also make editing more intuitive - highlighting the sentence + ⇧⌘F rather than [space]+ sentence + [space]. Users are less likely to grasp the current method before visiting this webpage. I struggled to make the footnotes work correctly for 2 weeks before starting to look for answers on this forum.

If I remember correctly we already had this conversation ages before. Which is not surprising as the inline footnotes have not changed over all those years, at least not significantly. (Or do they?)

What I cannot remember is if someone came up with the suggestion that maybe Scrivener could automatically insert a non-width space at the beginning of every inline footnote that gets trimmed in Compile. And if so, if it would work at all.

At first glance it seems to: The user does not have to do anything, it is invisible, but it divides the word the inline note is anchored to from the first word of the note and because of that the spellchecker does not get confused.

The only possible cons that come to my mind right now are that some fonts might not include a non-width space. And on one hand the non-width space could get deleted accidentally and on the other it would require an extra stroke of backspace if one decides to delete the inline footnote as a whole.